Humanitarian ‘Impulses’ vs. Convictions

Joseph Loconte

Writing in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Princeton professor Gary Bass observes that despite the ongoing crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan and the difficulties in the U.S.-led war in Iraq, “the idea of humanitarian intervention remains intact.”

In his essay, “Humanitarian Impulses: Why Interventions Aren’t Going Away,” Mr. Bass argues that the concept of military intervention to stop ethnic cleansing and genocide is as much a European idea as an American one:

“In fact, Europeans were backing humanitarian interventions almost two centuries ago, while Americans were often the ones who objected. Throughout the 19th century, people in Britain, France and Russia urged the dispatch of troops to stop killings in places like Poland and Bulgaria—even when doing so undermined the national interest. Some of the most celebrated European names—Victor Hugo, William Wilberforce, Anthony Trollope, Oscar Wilde—demanded action.”

It’s heartening to hear the name of Wilberforce, the parliamentarian and evangelical leader who helped end the slave trade in Britain, cited constructively in the pages of the New York Times. It’s also true that the United States often has been extremely reluctant to commit itself to purely humanitarian missions. Yet to suggest that France and Russia have been devoted to the defense and promotion of human rights on a par with the United States (or Great Britain) is to play fast and loose with the historical facts. (We need only mention French complicity in the Rwandan genocide or Russian brutalities in Chechnya.)

Mr. Bass also neglects to mention that the concept of humanitarian intervention owes its greatest debt to the Christian “just war” tradition. Under this view, the use of military force to protect innocent life from gross human rights abuses becomes the moral duty of a just society. Though the religious roots of the doctrine were downplayed, they profoundly shaped the 2005 U.N. debate over its “responsibility to protect” doctrine. (See this PDF report from the US Institute of Peace)

Why is that important? Because the Christian concepts of human dignity and human evil are crucial to any humanitarian doctrine worthy of the name. No democratic state can boast a stellar record in applying the just-war principle of intervention—as the horrors of Bosnia, Burma, Darfur, and Rwanda remind us. Yet it seems facile to hope that nations that ignore or belittle these Christian principles will summon the moral and military resources required to intervene in time, if at all.

Fodder, War and Peace, Joseph Loconte, Wed 20 Aug 2008